Bradwardine and Buckingham on the extramundane void

Author(s):  
Edit Anna Lukács

In the corollaries to Book I, Chapter 5 of De causa Dei, Thomas Bradwardine assumes the existence of an actual, infinite, God-filled extramundane void. Thomas Buckingham, Bradwardine’s former student, develops in the unedited Question 23 of his Quaestiones theologicae a rejection of the void’s existence precisely in opposition to the theory of his master. His argumentation is not only remarkable in its own; it also allows us to reassess essential concepts from Bradwardine’s De causa Dei, such as divine power, causality and ubiquity. This paper first presents the Aristotelian notion of the void in rendering it in the context of the philosophy of nature at fourteenth-century Oxford; it is then dedicated to the analysis of the chapter in question from De causa Dei along with Buckingham’s answer. It is accompanied by a critical edition of Question 23 from Buckingham’s Quaestiones theologicae, »Utrum sit necesse ponere Deum esse extra mundum in situ seu vacuo imaginario infinito«.

Author(s):  
Samuel Asad Abijuwa Agbamu

AbstractIn his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.


2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-291
Author(s):  
Yves Porter

Abstract The Shahi ʿIdgah at Rapri (Uttar Pradesh), which dates to 1312, was built by Malik Kafur, the general of the Delhi sultan ʿAla⁠ʾuddin Khalji (1296–1316). The village of Rapri was part of Malik Kafur’s fief and an important station for the army, as it commanded a ford on the Yamuna River. ʿĪdgāhs, sometimes translated as “wall-mosques,” are extra-urban, open prayer spaces for accommodating large congregations during the two main religious festivals (ʿīds). The Rapri ʿīdgāh constitutes a major landmark in the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate, mainly because of its exceptional decoration of turquoise-glazed tiles, the oldest example of its kind still in situ. Although often considered a technique that originated in the Iranian domains, the making of glazed tiles was already known in the Kushan period (first to fourth century CE), and some findings have been excavated from Buddhist contexts in the nearby Mathura region. This study shows the link between the tiles of Rapri and later fourteenth century examples, and with glazed pottery.


Traditio ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 113-147
Author(s):  
Rondo Keele

A work of natural science dating from the second half of the fourteenth century, Richard Lavenham's De causis naturalibus (henceforth DCN) is a theoretically simple, brief, and sometimes fanciful compendium of lore, Aristotelian science, and Christian authority on a variety of meteorological topics. A fair range of authorities and subjects is discussed in this relatively short work, from Augustine to Aristotle and from the cause of rainbows to the source of the tides. Neither an in-depth treatise nor a focused commentary, DCN is rather a summary of the mechanics of sun-caused exhalations in the sublunar region and of the various phenomena these exhalations produce.


1926 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. McN. Rushforth

When Birtsmorton Church, Worcestershire, was rebuilt in the fourteenth century, a number of its windows were filled with painted glass of the period. The only portions now in situ are the arms of the Ruyhales, the lords of the manor, in the tracery lights of some of the windows in the nave, and of one in the north transept. What remained of the contents of the main lights, together with various fragments in the style of the fifteenth century, had been collected, perhaps early in the last century, in the east window of the chancel, where facsimile drawings, partly coloured, were made of them for Dr. Prattinton, whose Worcestershire collections are in our library. When the church was restored in 1877, the east window was rebuilt on a new pattern, but the glass was not replaced in it, and ultimately found its way into the adjoining ‘Birtsmorton Court’, where the present owner Mr. F. B. Bradley-Birt discovered it lying loose, and had the fragments releaded so as to form two panels. When I first saw the latter, I recognized that they contained the principal elements of the drawings in the Prattinton collection with which I had recently made acquaintance.


1951 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 154-159
Author(s):  
S. F. Bridges

The purpose of this note is to discuss a late fourteenth-century tomb slab in the church of Santa Maria della Incoronata in Naples. In the course of collecting material for a study of the medieval tombs of Naples, which the Director of the British School at Rome and the present writer are preparing, this tomb, which is in many ways eccentric to the rest of the series, seemed of sufficient interest to merit treatment on its own.The slab (pl. XXI, 1), of Greek marble, now stands on end, together with six others, against the south wall of the west aisle. When Cesare d'Engenio saw it in the early seventeenth century it was still in situ in the floor of the same aisle. The figure is carved in low relief beneath a delicately traceried canopy with pinnacles and spiral columns, the whole set within a rectangular inscribed frame.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hoła

Abstract The article presents original methodology of testing the moisture content of brick walls in buildings. It was developed on the basis of own experience acquired during testing the moisture content in many excessively wet buildings erected in various historical periods. The tests were conducted using different methods, including non-destructive methods. To emphasize the importance of the problem, an overview of the methodology was preceded by a brief presentation of the causes and negative effects of excessive moisture and salinity in brick walls. In addition, the article is illustrated with an example of the effects of moisture content tests carried out according to the developed methodology on a facility from the fourteenth century. According to the author, knowledge of the presented methodology, and its application, should contribute to both the improvement of the quality of conducted research and the credibility of the obtained results.


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